The UAE's ambassador for all things nuclear

Hamad Al Kaabi, the UAE's ambassador for all things nuclear, is a rare combination of scientist and statesman.

Hamad Al Kaabi, the UAE's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency and top nuclear negotiator. Silvia Razgova / The National

He started his journey last week in Canada for nuclear cooperation talks. He then stopped in France to tour radioactive-waste sites and ended the week in Abu Dhabi, where he has an office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in addition to one at the United Nations complex in Vienna.
Hamad Al Kaabi, the UAE's permanent representative to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, is the nation's diplomat for all things nuclear.
The first Emirati graduate in nuclear engineering, he is as well-versed in negotiating bilateral atomic cooperation deals as in modelling nuclear accidents with complex equations.
Forget the scholar-statesman. Meet the scientist-statesman.
Mr Al Kaabi's rise to the top of one of the region's most strategic and sensitive endeavours - a bid by the UAE to become by 2017 the first Arab nation to produce nuclear energy - began 13 years ago in Al Ain.
As a high school student from a military family, the young Al Kaabi had already developed an interest in atomic power.
In 1999, he entered the engineering programme at Indiana's Purdue University and soon made nuclear studies his speciality. It was nine years before the UAE would announce its plan to produce atomic power.
"I've always been fascinated by nuclear energy, particularly by how you can get so much energy from such a small amount of fuel," recalled Mr Al Kaabi. "The question was, where are you going to work afterwards?"
The option of staying in academia to perform atomic research was enough for Mr Al Kaabi at the time.
He began working with research reactors, small-scale machines that are submersed underwater so that people are protected from radiation while being able to see inside.
A blue light, called Cherenkov radiation, beams out of the reactors when they are at full power, and Mr Al Kaabi found himself being drawn to it like a modern-day Gatsby.
Staying on for a master's degree, Mr Al Kaabi specialised in modelling severe accident scenarios in gas-cooled reactors, which use a unique spherical fuel.
He was then hired by the Executive Affairs Authority (EAA), the Government's agency for strategic policy.
"Ambassador Al Kaabi has that unique blend of deep technical knowledge, an incredibly strong work ethic and a real gift for working with people," said David Scott, the executive director of economic and energy affairs at the EAA.
At the EAA, Mr Al Kaabi became part of the team that wrote the nation's white paper on nuclear energy, spending 11 months to shape the critical 15-page document that would unveil the nation's nuclear plans to the world.
The small group working on the paper in 2008 gave the document one of its final proofreads on a train from Paris to Brussels, part of a global circuit that Mr Al Kaabi continues today as he forges the bilateral ties necessary for the transfer of nuclear knowledge and supplies.
Later, as envoy to the IAEA in Vienna, he engineered the country's election to the UN atomic watchdog's board of governors in 2010.
Nowadays, he can be found variously at the headquarters of the IAEA, in Abu Dhabi at work on the review of the first reactor construction licence application, or on a direct Etihad flight to South Korea, which has the contract to supply the UAE with four nuclear reactors.
Atomic power is so integral to Mr Al Kaabi's identity that his Twitter handle is HamadNuke.
When taking a rare break from work, Mr Al Kaabi - who turns 31 next week - indulges his inner computer geek or takes his Audi R8 for a spin around the Yas Marina Circuit.
What if history had taken another direction and the UAE had not set itself on the nuclear path?
"I would probably still be trying to convince the Government to pursue that," said Mr Al Kaabi.
[e-mail]